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Tuesday, 25 November 2008

Blog Notes

I know I promised not to mention anything about our affiliate links more than once a month, but this is more in the nature of apprising you about a policy change. From now on, after every third or fourth post the links will just be added at the end of the post, as in the post below this one.

The reason is that something like 6k readers, give or take, read us through full feeds on feed readers, so they don't see the ads or links here on the actual website. It's been suggested that I should add advertisements to the feeds, and a smart guy could do that. But I'm just a writer, and I have finished trying. Done. Given up. Please don't write offering to help; I don't intend to spend even one more minute thinking about it. I can't get it done, and that's that. I accept my incompetence and fate.

I can't get the new eMusic Download Manager to work properly either, and sometimes it's a very good thing I don't keep firearms in the house. While I am at it, I hate the new Firefox. It's clear that for v.3 they hired all the unemployed Vista engineers that Microsoft fired.

Anyway, if the links at the end of posts annoy you, please ignore 'em. I can only do what I can only do.

_________________

Mike

P.S. If you were watching football last night, aren't we smart up here in Wisconsin? Did we make the brainy move, or what? Unloaded that Brett Favre guy in the nick of time. That old guy can't do anything any more, and the new guy is capable of putting 29 points up on the scoreboard on any given Monday. How great is that.

Our coach and general manager are looking like geniuses to us right about now, that's for sure. Maybe they should both be called "Jerry."*

*After "the Jerrys," if you don't get the reference, Reinsdorf and Krause, the blithering pea-brained idiots who dismantled the Jackson/Jordan Bulls. The Jerrys didn't have one whole brain between them.**

**I hope neither of them are readers.

P.S.Despite my crabby comments above—forgive me—I have to admit that even before he retired, I was getting pretty sick of Favre's annual "Show me you love me" shenanigans. Every year it was the same damn thing—was he going to retire? Wasn't he? Would he please come back for one more year pretty pretty please? The wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth when there was a chance he'd retire and then the hosannas and ringing of church bells when he'd magnanimously decide to return. We had gone through at least five years of it up here. So then he finally retires and of course the Packers have to put in place alternative plans. Then he decides to UN-retire at the last minute and he expects the Packers to un-make all their new plans. I don't blame the Packers for the situation, I blame Brett. After all, nobody forced him to retire. If he'd decided he wanted to come back to the Packers, the door would have been open for sure. It was his decision. All the Packers did was abide by it. Watching us make the Saints look like the Giants does tend to make a guy a bit sore, but I wish Mr. Favre well in New York and, being magnanimous myself, I won't even predict he'll throw four interceptions when the Jets play in the Championship game. Now I'd better shut up or my house will get pelted with green and yellow eggs.

Comments

Well, as for the football game, from one Packer fan to another; I think our defense forgot to travel with the team. Rodgers looked good in the first half, before he started throwing interceptions. (Of course, I went to bed at 10. Did we win or lose?) :-)

Don't be too hard on Rodgers though - 29 points generally puts an NFL team in position to win - except when a defense allows 51. The Saints could've made that game look like OU vs. Texas Tech like if Sean Payton really wanted to do it.

What, exactly, is it about Firefox 3 that's so wrong? I moved seamlessly from 2 to 3 to now running the nightly-builds of 3.1 (which is amazingly fast) with no problem. So obviously I'm missing something important (again?).

Great way to do it Mike, thanks for being sensitive to your readers. In all honesty, I wouldn't even mind if they were there on every post, or if they were images instead of text links. For me, it's not a problem having ads in the feed, so long as I can view it in my reader.

phule,
It's probably just me. As I say I'm not good at this stuff. But to start with it could simply work right--whenever I'm closing comment windows, about one out of every six times I click on "x" it acts like I clicked on "-" and collapses the window to the dock. Very annoying. And generally it seems to have lost the simplicity of the old interface, in favor of more features.

A few links post script is an elegant solution--smaller and less obtrusive than many email signature blocks I see. I had put them out of mind after the first glance (as I do with email sigs) until you mentioned them. I doubt it would bother me if they were on every post. In fact, I appreciate the reminder--I read TOP via RSS.

By the way, I think that portrait of the pug Smash is a masterful study in palette, texture, shape and composition, with just enough personality and context to intrigue. Really wonderful. There is chops, and there is sensibility.

I would have to agree that Firefox 3.x sucks. On one computer, it refuses to render web pages correctly if I have other memory intensive applications open. On another computer, I can't view anything that requires Flash because it refuses to install the current version. You can't clear the bookmark history on the not-at-all-Awesome Bar unless you install a plug-in to do it. Granted, it's free, and you get what you pay for, but 2.x was free too and it never hassled me the way 3.x does.

Oh, that's what those links are about. I thought those links were kind of a minor annoyance (i.e., nothing that's going to change my reading habits).

Regarding Favre and Rodgers--well, after he changed his mind about retiring the Packers were damned if they did and damned if they didn't this year. If they kept him, I think they would have lost Rodgers and would have wound up with nothing when Favre retires for real. Now that they let him go they've exposed themselves to a lot of criticism since he's having a good season and the Jets are looking better than the Packers.

[[whenever I'm closing comment windows, about one out of every six times I click on "x" it acts like I clicked on "-"]]

I middle-click anywhere on a tab and it closes and do not bother with [x]'s. In fact, I modified my about:config and removed the [x]'s entirely from my tabs.

I have a computer give me problems with updating Flash, but it was an Adobe problem, not a Firefox problem. I downloaded the official Adobe Flash uninstaller, ran it, and then ran the latest installer and it worked. Never had to do anything more than that.

My brain filters out the visited page history changes because I never use (or used) it. I send everything to del.icio.us I want to remember via Bookmark Toolbar javascript.

So, I guess I'm just not seeing what others here are seeing. It's stable, it's functional, and (as mentioned) the 3.1 builds load pages very quickly.

Of course, I'm on Windows XP not on Mac OS X so I have no clue if the difference is nothing more than that.

As for the advertising tails at the end of each posting, good idea. Maybe people will get the hint.

Reichmann's so-called free offer is interesting. The D90 sells here in Canada
for $1190.00 at Henrys. Suspect it's as with all things similar, it was new, it served its
purpose, now begone, and not to a nearby shelf to collect dust. A wise move IMO.

Otherwise is ugly as sin. And light, it is not. Nor fast. But it can be easily modified and tweaked, which brings us back to the Vista tip. But Chrome is fast. But doesn't goes full screen as I like, and... oh, well...

Firefox on the Mac is going through big changes, much like the Mac itself. Firefox 3 ia not supported on Mac OS X prior to 1.4 Firefox 3 is based on Cocoa. Firefox 2 is based on Carbon. Apple is dropping support for lot of old applications in upcoming releases. You may have heard some noise about the difficulties Adobe is having with moving Photoshop from Cocoa to Carbon on the Mac.

I've been using Firefox 3 on XP, Mac, and Linux and it's vastly better than Firefox 2 , although the first couple of revs were not nearly as good as 3.0.4

Have you been able to get an affiliate relationship with the Epson store? I'm mulling over a refurbished Epson 3800 and that is a sizable chunk of change. I also see Atlex mentioned all the time when researching ink suppliers so perhaps another opportunity?